You will like this if you enjoy: Smashing forts and castles up with a big catapult. If you’re a bit tired of all the side-view castle smashing games (and the ones with birds in them), this is a fabulous reboot of the genre, he said, sounding like a complete twonk.

Well, you would go and make your fort out of a pile of wooden crates…

The good news: Virtually flawless gameplay. Perfect control system. Yes, I said perfect and it really is. Excellent graphics that are wonderfully smooth on 1st gen iPad and 4th gen Touch. The magic points that you need for the power-ups are very easy to stockpile. A whole lot of fun; castle smashing has never felt less like a chore. Smirking, taunting and occasionally even mooning defenders (aka targets) make victory so much more enjoyable. Precision targeting is fairly easy, more so on the larger (iPad) screen. Explore mode lets you fully traverse, zoom and rotate the target zone. There’s no time limit.

The bad news: The game has no initial menu, which may confuse some people, loading up and dropping you immediately into the most recent level you have reached, or the first level if it’s your first time. That isn’t really a negative point, just something a bit odd that I thought I’d mention.

Arcadelife verdict: Such a fun game! The projectile trajectories are so good that you can almost completely dispense with the magic power that shows where a lobbed boulder will land, at least through the first two batches of levels. Destruction physics are similarly superb, with domino effects, splash damage and a whole screen-full of flying debris with never a framerate drop or stutter in sight. Apart from a moderately slow initial load, the game flows smoothly with hardly any noticeable lag between shots or levels.

This is what I had hoped for from Siegecraft, but didn’t get; a catapult game focussing on the basic mechanics of aiming a catapult with loads of immensely satisfying destruction. By concentrating on what makes medieval siege engines fun in a video game, instead of bogging the gameplay down with lore, extraneous chores and an unwieldy targeting system, the makers of Catapult King have really hit the target. Ouch, yes indeed. Here’s a tip – don’t be too quick to tap the retry button, as masonry often continues to topple and crush the prematurely celebrating defenders long after your final shot has been fired.